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It’s a place of unchecked executive authority and mind numbing regulations run amok. No, I’m not talking about Washington, but your typical modern university campus. College costs more than ever and students and parents increasingly fret whether they’re getting their money’s worth. But there’s one area in which American colleges are excelling: banishing certain ideas from public debate.

A generation ago, college students marched demanding freedom of speech. Now many of those old campus radicals have become administrators and are demanding freedom from speech, including ”microaggression” reporting services designed to cleanse the English language of any locution that might offend. Didn’t George Orwell warn us about this?

How does stamping out unpopular ideas prepare someone for life after college? How are students supposed to go out into the world, unleash creative destruction upon obsolete businesses and industries, and take on the challenges of adulthood if they spend their early lives covered in protective gear? Innovation comes from challenging the status quo, not kowtowing to it.

One Response to “Daily Caller – Campus Crusade For Conformity”

Well said, Bill, and you only used one word that I didn’t know. I think this topic deserves mention of the necessary limits of acceptable discourse – when protests imply, suggest, or provoke violence and when speech intimidates listeners and actually impedes free expression. I’m thinking specifically about the paid political organizers who enroll in one class and use their student ID to gain entrance to campus events, hallways and quadrangles where they spew violence and disrupt speakers with whom they disagree, even while denying those same legitimate students the right to respond at their own forums. I’m hearing such stories weekly now. Many students are afraid to walk their campuses, the hatred is so vicious. There is a difference between unpopular opinion, which we have to permit and even defend, and ad hominem hatred, which we must recognize as such and contain. /Rick